Have you ever read a history book that you couldn’t put down?  Neither had I before I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.  This book has been taught in AP U.S. history, but my interest in it was really awakened when I heard an NPR story about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon making it into a documentary.  (Look for that).  

I have never read anything that so pointedly exposes the ruthlessness, hypocrisy, greed, and corruption of the leaders of the United States.   Zinn begins with the true story of Columbus’s conquest of the Bahamas, detailing what should be considered genocide of the Arawak Indians. ”By 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left.  By 1550, there were five hundred” (5).  He uses this example to point out that historians selectively recount details in order to justify so-called “progress”.  He writes, “But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)–that is still with us.  One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth” (9). 

History is told by the conquerors, and governments “ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest,” Zinn writes (10).  This book will sicken and enrage you and prove to you that the U.S. government has always served only business interests.  Politicians are simply pawns of corporations.  Thus, W.H. Auden was right when he wrote, “Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young.  Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.”

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Speaking of fiction…

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

This novel is fascinating and beautiful.  It’s the story of the “intersexual” grandchild of Greek immigrants–her story, her parents’ story, and her grandparents’ story.  It’s a coming of age story that is absolutely spellbinding. 

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